Raphael Kadushin, Senior Acquisitions Editor for The University of Wisconsin Press, introduces a story he wrote for the anthology, Big Trips: More Good Gay Writing.The story, called “At Home with James Herriot,” is available in its entirety at the Book Club for the next week. Don’t miss it; it’s hilarious.

This is a story I wrote for my anthology Big Trips: More Good Gay Travel Writing published by Terrace Books, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press. The story is clearly (I hope) fiction, with maybe just a little seam of autobiography (it’s actually the slightly altered chapter from a novel-in-progress). And the fact that it’s fiction is true to the anthology itself, which deliberately blends different genres (fiction, creative nonfiction, plays, etc). Why? In putting together a collection of strong travel writing I didn’t want to limit the pieces and I wanted to avoid the generic consumer travel piece (the 10 best brewpubs in London and 36 hours in Seville sort of piece). Instead I was looking for strong essays and stories that reclaimed classic, impressionistic travel writing, the kind that convey the flavor and sensibility of a place, explore the reasons we travel, and consider how we define home. So I asked some of the finest sometimes inadvertent travel writers writing today (Edmund White, Dale Peck, Andrew Holleran, Michael Klein, Douglas Martin, Bruce Benderson, Brian Bouldrey, Martin Sherman, etc) and collected a real range of beautiful, narrative pieces that span the world (Prague, Vienna and Provincetown to Paris, Cario, Morocco, London, San Francisco, Florida, Rome, Mexico, Greece, Spain, the Dordogne, and Sicily). So there is something in Big Trips for everyone who loves to travel (and probably can’t afford to now) and anyone who likes a good well-told story.

More Good Gay Travel Writing
Edited by Raphael Kadushin
Publication Date: November 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-299-22860-6 Cloth, $24.95, 312 pages
Terrace Books: A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/4291.htm

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